Here it is, all my website buying and selling knowledge laid out for you guys to study. I have tried to make this guide as open and as explanatory as I possible but I can be very hasty while typing so excuse me if I miss anything and feel free to ask questions below.
Moving forward, the first thing I want you to get into your head is this simple rule. You need money to make this work and the more money you have to invest the better. For those new to internet marketing get this fact straight, unless you are a whiz kid with lots of time (which we know is money) you need money to make money online.
For those that are new, flipping websites simply means buying a website and selling it for a lot more. In other scenarios, this could be a website built up from the ground up that is later sold at a profit. The whole buying and selling of websites comes under flipping. There are 3 main stages or what I like to call tiers you can target when it comes to flipping websites for profit we have the low tier, mid tier and high tier. But before delving deep into these I would like to maybe broaden your knowledge on websites.
Websites are the real estates of the Internet and should be handled the way you handle properties in the real world.
When you start off building a house or flat, you need a land and a good location (not so important for new builds). Other things to consider is style and design, target market and most of all you want to leave room for BIG profit if you selling or very desirable if you building for yourself. The same principles applies to websites; your domain is your land, your location is your website niche and the rests like style, design and target markets fits themselves in nicely. Armed with this knowledge you can always go into a website project knowing your end goal and prepare for it like you prepare and plan for building a house.
With this out of the way, let me move on to the tiers.
The Low Tier
This is where majority of newbies fall into and you can understand why. It requires little to no start up costs and can be slapped together in as little as a day. They have become very popular in recent months, so popular in-fact that flippa the number 1 website trading platform has created a section for them; they are called the starter sites. The idea is simple, get a website with little to no income and sell it off promising it can make bla bla amount in the right hands with some marketing and SEO, offer them with so many benefits that is makes the offer too good to be true! But that is exactly what it is, it’s mostly too good to be true. It will take considerable amount of leg work and time that it would be better if you had started the website yourself!
I don’t advise this route when starting up and because of this I will not be touching up on it.
The Mid Tier
This is where I focus and dabble on. Requires a little bit of dedication and some know how to get it right but once you do, you can churn out the sites easily and can often sell a site at least every month. Sales in this tier generally from the $x,xxx to the mid $xx,xxx. Anything up to six figures and higher is considered high tier.
If you remember what I said earlier about websites being real estates of the Internet and how that is how they should be approached, then for seasoned property developers, they know the drill and know how to go off and set up but for newbies like ourselves, here are some steps to approach a website flipping business.
You can buy an under performing website with potential, maybe a tier one website and spend some time and TLC on it and later flip it.
You can pick a well performing website at a bargain and resell for profit! I have done this so many times where I see a seller listing a website for sale hurriedly and have gotten a hurried price in return. If you can spend a considerable amount of time to create a listing you can be sure interested buyers will appreciate it and will reward you for that by paying extra. It’s a simple strategy, for example, when there is an open house for a property sale, extra care is taken to clean up the house, bake cookies and all that sweet spots you get when viewing a house to buy to make you splash out that wonga! It is all in the detail people so please do not miss that.
You can buy a domain (land) and develop it into something awesome and then sell it. This is the honey pot and if done properly, you can make bucket loads of money within a short period of time. Here is what you want to do, we already know websites are real estates so we want to find a good land, a good location and then build an awesome property on it. The quick fire route to finding a good land sorry a good domain is going through EXPIRED DOMAINS period.
There are many reasons to use expired domains and I will try and explore some of them. Domains have metrics that are used when evaluating them and this sometimes determines the value and how much it will go for if and when offered for sale. But also remember this, the true value of a domain name is what someone is willing to pay for it. With that being said, domains with high pagerank, domain authority, page authority, trust flow, citation flow and sometimes moz rank tend to sell for a whole lot of money. The main reason is because most buyers are using the domains for something way heavier than flipping, they are building strong private blog networks. This discussion is not about blog networks and I will not be getting into it but if you want something on blog networks then by all means shoot me up a PM and I will see what I can do.
So you want to find a good domain name that has decent metrics and has not been abused, just as it is with land, a piece of land that has been defecated on and is sinking will cost you A LOT OF MONEY to bring it back from that brink. So you want to be careful when going after domain names with high metrics. Some possible downfalls could be faked pagerank, domain authority and page authority inflated by spam link profile and most importantly, the domain has been banned from search engines. You have to be very careful of the latter as this can step you a few months back if you decide to use a banned domain. A simple ‘info:yourdomain.com’ and ‘site:yourdomain.com’ typed in google can help you see if a domain is banned in google.
Next step is finding a niche, which is our location. The thing is this, some niches are simply just better than others end of. I will not debate it with you and I will not get into it but you want to pick a profitable niche. There are many tools out there for spotting niches and untapped potential and doing a simple google can unearth these tools.
These are the two main things you want to pay attention to for now the domain and the niche and I will be talking about them in the second part of this post.
Feel free to drop a line if you have any questions.
Ciao
